er till that
moment realized how completely he lacked a position of his own in the
universe of created being.

FOOTNOTES:

[26] June 20-27, 1897.

[27] All this is now ancient history. 1903.

XXIII.

LORD BEACONSFIELD.

Archbishop Tait wrote on the 11th of February 1877: "Attended this week
the opening of Parliament, the Queen being present, and wearing for the
first time, some one says, her crown as Empress of India. Lord
Beaconsfield was on her left side, holding aloft the Sword of State. At
five the House again was crammed to see him take his seat; and Slingsby
Bethell, equal to the occasion, read aloud the writ in very distinct
tones. All seemed to be founded on the model, 'What shall be done to the
man whom the king delighteth to honour?'"

_Je ne suis pas la rose, mais j'ai vecu pres d'elle_. For the last
month[28] our thoughts have been fixed upon the Queen to the exclusion
of all else; but now the regal splendours of the Jubilee have faded. The
majestic theme is, in fact, exhausted; and we turn, by a natural
transition, from the Royal Rose to its subservient primrose; from the
wisest of Sovereigns to the wiliest of Premiers; from the character,
habits, and life of the Queen to the personality of that extraordinary
child of Israel who, though he was not the Rose, lived uncommonly near
it; and who, more than any other Minister before or since his day,
contrived to identify himself in the public view with the Crown itself.
There is nothing invidious in this use of a racial term. It was one of
Lord Beaconsfield's finest qualities that he laboured all through his
life to make his race glorious and admired. To a Jewish boy--a friend of
my own--who was presented to him in his old age he said: "You and I
belong to a race which knows how to do everything but fail."

Is Lord Beaconsfield's biography ever to be given to the world? Not in
our time, at any rate, if we may judge by the signs. Perhaps Lord Rowton
finds it more convenient to live on the vague but splendid anticipations
of future success than on the admitted and definite failure of a too
cautious book. Perhaps he finds his personal dignity enhanced by those
mysterious flittings to Windsor and Osborne, where he is understood to
be comparing manuscripts and revising proofs with an Illustrious
Personage. But there is the less occasion to lament Lord Rowton's
tardiness, because we already possess Mr. Froude's admirable monograph
on Lord Beaconsfield